It is a sure sign that the advocates of the “global warming” and “climate change” hoaxes know that the public no longer believes that the former is occurring or that the latter represents an immediate, global threat.

Even though the “climate skeptics”, scientists who have produced research proving false methodology and the conclusions based on it are quite few in number, an effort to silence them by smearing their reputations and denying funding for their work has been launched and it is based entirely on a lie.

Scientists are supposed to be skeptical, not only of other scientist’s findings, but their own. Good science must be able to reproduce the results of published research. In the case of the many computer models cited as proof that global warming was occurring or would, the passing years have demonstrated that none were accurate.

As Joseph L. Bast, president of The Heartland Institute and Joseph A. Morris, an attorney who has fought in several countries to defend free speech, wrote in a February 24 commentary, “The Crucifixion of Dr. Wei-Hock Soon”, of an article co-authored with Christopher Monckton, Matt Briggs, and David Legates, and published in the Science Bulletin, a publication of the Chinese Academy of Sciences “The article reveals what appears to be an error in the computer models used to predict global warming that leads models to over-estimate future warming by a factor of three.” (Emphasis added) Their commentary has been downloaded more than 10,000 times!

“If the work of Soon et al is confirmed by other scientists, the ‘global warming crisis’ may need to be cancelled and we can all enjoy lower taxes, fewer regulations, and more personal freedom.” However, “having failed to refute the article, environmentalists turned to smearing the authors.”

Little wonder the “Warmists” are worried; the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1996. People are noticing just how cold this record-breaking and record-setting winter is.

The attack on Dr. Soon began with a Greenpeace news release that was republished on the front page of The New York Times on February 22nd. Despite its august reputation, The Times’ coverage of climate issues has been an utter disgrace for decades. As public interest waned, it eliminated its staff of reporters exclusively devoted to writing about the “environment.”

Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic and director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted on February 27th that the Greenpeace attack on Dr. Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics claimed they had secured $1.2 million in funding for his research over the past decade and that it came from energy corporations, electric utilities, and charitable foundations related to those companies. The truth, however, is “that the grants were made not to Dr. Soon but to the Smithsonian, which never complained while taking its sizable cut off the top.”

Columnist Larry Bell who is also an endowed professor at the University of Houston, disputed the Greenpeace claim, saying, “First, let’s recognize that the supporting FOIA documents referred to an agreement between the Smithsonian (not Dr. Soon) and Southern Company Services, Inc., whereby 40 percent of that more than $1.2 million went directly to the Smithsonian” leaving “an average funding of $71,000 a year for the past eleven years to support the actual research activities.”

Focusing on Greenpeace and its Climate Investigations Center which describes itself as “a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change”, Bell asked “Do these activist organizations make their estimated $360,000,000 annual funding publicly available?” Bell said “Ad hominem assaults disparaging the integrity of this leading authority on relationships between solar phenomena and global climate are unconscionable.”

In his article, “Vilifying realist science and scientists”, Paul Driessen, a policy advisor to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), noted that in 2012 Greenpeace USA was the recipient of $32,791,149 and that this is true of other environmental pressure groups that in 2012 secured $111,915.138 for the Environmental Defense Fund, $98,701,707 for the Natural Resources Defense Council, $97,757,678 for the Sierra Club, and, for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, $19,150,215.

“All told,” noted Driessen, “more than 16,000 American environmental groups collect(ed) total annual revenues of over $13.4 billion (2009 figures). Only a small part of that comes from membership dues and individual contributions.” With that kind of money you can do a lot of damage to scientist’s reputation.

They fear that the public may actually learn the truth about “global warming” and the fear-mongering claims about “climate change” does not stop with just the environmental organizations. At the same time The New York Times was printing the Greenpeace lies, U.S. Senators Ed Market (D-Mass), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) joined together on February 25th to send letters to 107 companies, trade associations, and non-profit groups demanding comprehensive information about all funding of research on climate or related issues.

Among the groups receiving the letter were two for whom I am a policy advisor, The Heartland Institute and CFACT, but others include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the American Energy Alliance.

Following The New York Times article, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, sent letters to the presidents of seven universities asking them to provide details about seven professors who are either prominent global warming skeptics.

As Rich Lowrey, editor of the National Review, pointed out on February 27th, that “Science as an enterprise usually doesn’t need political enforcers. But proponents of a climate alarmism that demands immediate action to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for itself.”

This is not fact-finding. It is an act of intimidation.

And it looks like a carefully organized effort to quash any research that might dispute “global warming” or “climate change” as defined by the Greens and by both the President and the Secretary of State as the greatest threat we and the rest of the world faces.

The greatest threat is the scores of environmental organizations that have been exaggerating and distorting their alleged “science” in order to thwart development here and around the world that would enhance everyone’s life. Now they are attacking real scientists, those who are skeptical of their claims, to silence them.

Another day, another attack on the integrity of the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, this time in the New York Times.

I first became aware of Soon in 2009 when reading through the Climategate emails. One of them was a jocular suggestion by a warmist called Tom Wigley as to how best to smear Soon and his co-author Sallie Baliunas.

Might be interesting to see how frequently Soon and Baliunas, individually, are cited (as astronomers). Are they any good in their own fields? Perhaps we could start referring to them as astrologers (excusable as..’oops, just a typo’.

You might be wondering what Soon and Baliunas had done to incur the wrath of the climate alarmist establishment. Well, they’d just published a meta-analysis of all the papers which had been written on the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). What their paper showed is that contrary to claims by one Michael Mann (the name may be familiar), the MWP was not a small, localised event but global, big and widespread.

So the memo went out from the Hockey Team (the uber-vindictive Mann and his lickspittle posse) to get Soon, and they’ve been going at him ever since: not by criticising the quality of his science - that would be too difficult because his science is impeccable - but simply by trying to make his life miserable, deny him tenure, and to smear him as compromised and corrupt.

The reason for the latest attack on Soon is that he is the co-author, with Christopher Monckton et al, of a paper published earlier this year in the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences journal Science Bulletin.

This study - Why Models Run Hot - infuriated the alarmist establishment, first because it was unusually popular (receiving over 10,000 views - thousands more than most scientific papers get) and second because it made a mockery of their cherished computer models.

As Paul Driessen explains:

Results from an irreducibly simple climate model, concluded that, once discrepancies in IPCC computer models are taken into account, the impact of CO2-driven manmade global warming over the next century (and beyond) is likely to be “no more than one-third to one-half of the IPCC’s current projections- that is, just 1-2 degrees C (2-4 deg F) by 2100! That’s akin to the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and would be beneficial, not harmful.

Rather than attack the substance of the paper, the warmists reverted to their usual tricks, lead by Kert Davies, an activist lawyer who works for a Greenpeace front organisation called Climate Investigations Center.

Climate Investigations Center executive director (and former top Greenpeace official) Kert Davies told the Boston Globe it “simply cannot be true” that the authors have no conflict of interest over their study, considering their alleged industry funding sources and outside consulting fees. Davies singled out Dr. Willie Soon, saying the Harvard researcher received more than $1 million from companies that support studies critical of manmade climate change claims. An allied group launched a petition drive to have Dr. Soon fired.

Davies’ libelous assertions have no basis in fact. Not one of these four authors received a dime in grants or other payments for researching and writing their climate models paper. Every one of them did the work on his own time. The only money contributed to the Science Bulletin effort went to paying the “public access” fees, so that people could read their study for free.

I spoke to Soon last night. He told me that of course he receives private funding for his research: he has to because it’s his only way of making ends meet, especially since the Alarmist establishment launched its vendetta against him when, from 2009 onwards, he became more outspoken in his critiques of global warming theory.

Harvard-Smithsonian strove to make his life harder and harder, first by banning him from working on anything even remotely connected with issues like climate change or CO2, then by moving his office away from the astrophysics department to a remote area Soon calls Siberia. What the faculty couldn’t quite do was actually sack Soon because it had no cause: he was producing too many quality papers, and he was also bringing in too much money (40 per cent of which goes straight into the faculty coffers).

So there’s nothing new or scandalous about this latest New York Times hit job on poor Willie Soon. It’s just a continuation of a vendetta which has been waged for years against an honest, decent, hardworking - and incredibly brave - scientist who refuses to toe the official (and increasingly discredited) line on man-made global warming.

What most definitely is scandalous is the vile hypocrisy of Soon’s harrassment by the warmist establishment, which receives billions every year from the US government, left-wing charities, and billionaire activists like Tom Steyer and George Soros (and in the Boston Globe by the scientifically illiterate and uber-hypocritical Senator Markey whose reelection was funded by millions from ‘big green’) to prop up their bankrupt cause by promoting exactly the kind of junk science which Soon (and similarly principled scientists) have made it their business to shred.

The warmists are losing their argument. Their desperation is beginning to show.

It was -2F Sunday in Boston and -3F pre-dawn Monday after the fourth major snowstorm in just over 3 weeks left behind 16.2 inches bringing the 23 day total to 90.2 inches. This may be the worst snow blitz since the Great Snows of 1717.

The total for the year is 95.7 inches, 3rd greatest for any season. It is just 0.6 behind 1993.94 (#2) and 11.9” behind the record of 107.6” (1995/96). The top 20 snow years are shown. the yellow years are the ‘analogs’ based on ocean, atmospheric and solar/lunar factors we used to predict a cold eastern winter this year and the historic one near the Great Lakes last year (7 of the top 20 years were analogs). Since we don’t have all the factors before 1950, we use analogs only after 1950. Some of the other years may have been good matches or analogs if we had that data for all the factors before 1950.

The average snow/melted ratio for the 4 big storms and the minor ones was about 18 to 1, which belies the idea the heavy snow was due to warm water hundreds of miles of the coast. Each of the major snows came with temperatures in the teens or lower. We have set records for February and any calendar month and likely snow depth (Blue Hill broke the 1995/96 record for snow depth).

And now areas to the south and west will get heavy snows and ice while the Great Lakes sits in frigid sub zero cold the next 10 days which is causing ice to increase rapidly approaching last year’s record.

The warmists have proposed that global warming induced warming of the western Atlantic was responsible for the big Boston snows. Warm water they postulate means more moisture for snow and rain. While moisture feeds storms, you need contrast with very cold air to produce heavy snows and this year it is the cold that is driving the fluffy 90 inches of snow in Boston.

First of all as noted, the 90.2 inches of snow in the last 23 days in four nor’easters came from 5.02 inches of water. This 18 to 1 ratio is well above the normal 10-1 ratio in the ‘average storm. It is because the air is so cold with snow during the events falling with temperatures mostly in the teens.

Also there is no evidence that the water just east of Cape Cod is 11.5 (21F) above normal as tweeted. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center Analysis showed water no more than 2 or 3C above normal well to the east of Cape Cod and with the very cold weather this month (over 11F below normal in the northeast), the water near the coast is colder than normal with ice forming. Ice is seen as far south as off the New Jersey Coast and will likely clog Boston and New York Harbor in the brutal cold of the next 10 days. Freezing spray warnings are in effect in the waters around NYC this morning.

One who believes that drives heavy precipitation would surely believe this would generate well above normal snows in places like Anchorage in winter. Notice the snow this season to date has produced just 20 inches in Anchorage, 35 inches below normal.

By the way Boston is rivaling February 1934 as the coldest month ever in Boston since 1872. So far, though today, Boston has averaged about 12.3F below normal for February. 1934 averaged -12.7F below normal. Some models are predicting the rest of the month to average 15F below normal, which would make this the coldest month of any month since 1872.

The last three years had heavy snows and last March was coldest ever in VT. 2nd coldest in NH, ME, 5th in MA. Despite the fact that winters have been cooling in the CONUS (all 9 climate regions) for the last 20 years and snows have been increasing, the Union of Concerned ‘Scientists’, an advocacy group whose environmentalists have taken over most universities at least here in the northeast have been advising the state goverments that warming was producing less snow and threatening the ski and maple sugar industries. They have been repeating this since at least 2007, ignoring new snow records not only in ski areas but in the big cities. Boston 10 year running mean is at a new high. A lot of bad energy and regulatory policy has been already enacted based on ‘failing climate models’ on the state and federal level.

While some democrats with full mainstream media support, are trying to silence scientists who don’t accept the so called consensus ‘warming’ position, mother nature is voting ‘Nay’.

Last three years had heavy snows and last March was coldest ever in VT. 2nd coldest in NH, ME, 5th in MA. It was the coldest and snowiest December to March ever in Chicago and snowiest ever in Detroit. NOAA and Enviornment Canada had projected at the end of November 2013 a warm winter for the Great lakes and east in 2013/14. NOAA’s winter outlook in October for 2014/15 smarting from a busted 2013/14 headlined the politically correct forecast

“Repeat of last year’s extremely cold, snowy winter east of Rockies unlikely.”

Note that we have high respect for NOAA forecasters at all levels who strive hard to provide accurate forecasts and life saving warnings. However, the last two years were high confidence cold forecasts based on ocean temperature patterns. I was told over dozen years ago, NOAA seasonal forecasters are not permitted to work with any factors not statistically determined by the universities or labs to be valid. Private sector forecasters can play detective and look at all factors- like ocean warm and cold pools outside the tropical Pacific and solar. See how well the ocean pools and other factors’ analog pattern (left) fit the actual November to February mean (through February 27) (right).

After a frigid November, in late December’s mild weather got the official winter off to a slow start nationwide. January brought cold but the thaw mid month knocked down the anomalies. Then came this February. The month has been a remarkable one from the Great Lakes to the Northeast and Mid Atlantic.

This February has been 2nd coldest winter month EVER in BOS behind only February 1934. BOS had 8 feet of snows since January 24th and will set the all-time record this week (they are now at 102”, record 107.6 inches in 1995/96).

In Boston, where they have had 8 feet of snow since January 24th, it was the 2nd coldest February and month ever. It was the snowiest winter (DJF) on record and will be the snowiest season perhaps by Monday. There is some evidence this may be the snowiest year since the Pilgrims were here in 1717.

It was the coldest month ever in Worcester and Hartford, 2nd coldest in Providence (like Boston trailing 1934).

In Concord it was the 2nd coldest February just 0.1F behind 1934. In Nashua the next town west from me, it was the coldest month ever beating out January 1888! Records go back to 1886. Nashua had 18 days at 0 or below and 25 days below freezing, both records for any month. We are foot away from the all time record.

The next 5-10 days, cold temperatures will help challenge the record. As with Antarctica, when the facts are inconvenient, expect the media to dredge up some story that implies the opposite. The last two weeks there were stories that Lake Superior may be warming faster than any other lake in the world. The last two years it has frozen over (rare because it is so deep) and last year ice flows remained into June with lake temperature 7F below normal.

In New York CIty it was the 3rd coldest February and 9th coldest month since records began in 1869.

The waves captured by NBC photographer Jonathan Nimerfroh are so thick with ice that they’ve drawn comparisons to ‘Slurpees’ and other frozen beverages, but the texture and shape of the wave also suggest a giant, grey tongue, licking the shores of Nantucket.

Here’s what the photographer had to say about his images: “When I pulled up to the beach I could see the horizon just look strange. When I got to the top off the dunes I saw that beginning about 300 yards away from the shoreline the ocean was starting to freeze. The high temp that day was around 19 degrees. The wind was howling from the southwest which would typically make rough or choppy conditions not so good for surfing, but since the surface of the sea was frozen slush the wind did not change the shape. What resulted was perfect, dreamy, slush waves. Most waves were around 2 feet with some larger sets slushing through around 3 foot or waist high. What an experience to be absolutely freezing on the beach watching these roll in while I mind-surfed them! I wonder if a shaper can make me a special designed slurfboard?”

“The next day I drove up to see if they melted but beginning that same 300 yards away from shore the water had frozen solid and there were no waves at all. I’ve been asking all the fishermen and surfers I know if they have ever seen such a thing and they have all reported that this is a first, a result of it being the coldest winter we’ve had in 81 years. I guess the people I asked weren’t old enough to remember a colder winter than this!”

One last thought, we hear that warming is why we are seeing more snow because warm air holds more water. Meteorologists know that cold weather produces snow. Indeed most big snow years are cold years, warm years lean on snow.

The use of petroleum is under attack as never before in today’s society. But contrary to the cries of critics, petroleum and the things people can do with petroleum are a modern miracle and a foundation of modern society.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations called for the world to move to “near zero emissions” of carbon dioxide by the year 2100. President Obama has threatened to veto the Keystone XL pipeline bill. Activist Bill McKibben has launched a national effort to persuade universities and colleges to divest financial holdings in oil companies. These efforts target the oil industry with the aim of eliminating the societal use of petroleum.

But have you ever stopped to consider what petroleum products do for people each and every day?

Back in 1620, it took the 120 passengers and crew of the Mayflower 25 days to travel from England to what was to become America. Two passengers died on the voyage. Today, a jumbo jet safely carries more than 300 passengers the same distance in less than seven hours. Each day, 25,000 commercial aircraft transport 9 million passengers a combined total of 10 billion miles, all powered by aviation fuel from petroleum.

Back in the late 1800s, the horse-drawn carriage became a preferred mode of transportation in major cities. By 1890, the average New York citizen took 297 horse car rides per year. The 200,000 horses of New York deposited three to six million pounds of manure in stables and on streets each day. When the “horseless carriage” replaced the mess and smell of the horse-drawn carriage, many regarded the car as a pollution-control invention. Each day today, fuel from petroleum powers more than one billion automobiles across the world.

Historically, goods traded between societies were transported by camel, wagon, and sail. While trade has grown throughout history, the value of total world exports amounted to only about $10 billion per year in 1900, measured in today’s dollars. Since 1900, world exports have exploded, increasing 1,800 times to a total of $18 trillion per year in 2013. Each day, more than 100 million tons of freight is carried by ship, train, truck, and plane, with more than 90 percent powered by fuel from petroleum.

Back in 1809, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France had a problem. When his armies marched across Europe, food supplies for his troops quickly spoiled. He offered a reward of 12,000 francs for a solution, which led to the invention of sterilized food sealed in tin cans. Historically, food was “packaged” in animal skins, glass, paper, metal cans, and wooden crates. Today, plastics from petroleum and other hydrocarbons provide safe, convenient, and inexpensive packaging for food and other products. More than two million plastic bottles and 1.3 billion plastic bags are consumed each day globally.

Each day, one-half million in-patient surgeries are performed across the world. Plastics from oil and natural gas play an essential role in modern medicine. Thousands of items, such as disposable catheters, surgical gloves, pharmaceutical drugs, hip implants and heart valves, bandages, and various parts of lab equipment are plastic, made from petroleum and other hydrocarbons.

Today we live in a golden age of low-cost energy. Just two hundred years ago, wood burning and human- and animal-muscle power provided more than 90 percent of society’s energy. Since 1800, global energy usage has increased by 26 times. Today, more than 30 percent of the world’s energy is provided by petroleum and more than 80 percent is provided by coal, natural gas, and oil.

Since 1800, global Gross Domestic Product has increased by a factor of 10, human life expectancy has more than doubled, and infant mortality is down by a factor of six. Since 1950, the years of education for world populations have more than doubled. In our golden age of hydrocarbon energy, people are wealthier, healthier, better educated, and enjoy more consumer goods and leisure time than any era in history.

Despite climate change warnings by the Obama administration and the United Nations, there is no evidence that carbon dioxide emissions from the petroleum industry have harmed a single person on Earth. Senior citizens continue to retire to southern states, disregarding foolish US government claims that warm climates are “dangerous.”

Satellite data shows global temperatures have been flat for the last 18 years, that storms are neither stronger nor more numerous than those of history, and that global sea ice extent remains at the 30-year average. Satellites further show that world vegetation has increased over the last 20 years, nourished by rising atmospheric CO2. And today’s polar bear populations are double the levels of 1960.

Nor is there evidence that petroleum use is causing increasing pollution of Earth’s environment. Today, air and water pollution is declining in all major industrialized nations. Nations that use the most energy and petroleum have the best air and water quality and the best methods for handling disposal of wastes. Trends indicate that developing nations will also achieve declining pollution levels as their national incomes rise.

We’re fortunate to be living in a golden age of energy, fueled by petroleum.

Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.

We ain’t seen nothing yet: The intense drought in California is only an appetizer compared with what’s coming this century across much of the western and central USA, according to a study out last Thursday.

During the years 2050 to 2100, the Southwest and Great Plains will face a persistent “megadrought” worse than anything seen in the past 1,000 years, and the dry conditions will be “driven primarily” by human-induced global warming, scientists said.

There’s at least an 80% chance of a megadrought in these regions if climate change continues unabated, Toby Ault, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University and co-author of the research, said at a news conference Thursday in San Jose.

A megadrought is defined as a drought that lasts for decades or longer, such as those that scorched portions of the West in the 12th and 13th centuries. Ault said megadroughts should be considered a natural hazard on par with earthquakes and hurricanes.

To identify past droughts, scientists studied tree rings to find out how much - or little - rain fell hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Scientists used that historical data in combination with 17 different computer model simulations to predict what changes we may see this century.

The computers showed robust and consistent drying in the Southwest and Plains, due to a combination of reduced precipitation and warmer temperatures that dried out the soils.

“Natural droughts like the 1930s Dust Bowl and the current drought in the Southwest have historically lasted maybe a decade or a little less,” Ben Cook, climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

-------
Icecap comments:

First the authors admit it happened before in 12th and 13th century. So such a thing is not unprecedented. Indeed, droughts have multiyear and longer variability. Instrumental data indicate that the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the 1950s drought were the most widespread twentieth-century droughts in the United States, while tree ring data indicate that the megadroughts over the 12th Century exceeded anything in the 20th Century in both spatial extent and duration.

Second, it is based on model simulations - the same models that have failed in every projection since the 1990s. Third the drought in Texas that they said was unprecedented was nothing like the multi year drought of the 1950s. Fourth the Calfirnia drought is related to the warm water off the west coast as an after effect of the super La Nina of 2010/11 which led to cold water there and warm to the west that migrated to the west coast. It will be gone in a year and rains will return. In fact this rainy season though not the heavy wet El Nino is running near normal for rains in the northern parts of California and the Sierra though snowpack lags. There wil be more episodic rains and snows and a slow exit from the drought can be expected the next year or so.

And finally, since, the 60 year cycle max has past, and the Atlantic cooling will accelerate the PDO will resume its cold mode and the sun will continue its dive into a 200 year minimum, temperatures will cool not warm the next few decades or longer. Ironically historic megadroughts have been common in cold periods because they tend to have amplified pattern and show more persistence in the patters leading to cold and warm areas. wet and dry areas. Their models are worthess because they do not consider the oceans and sun and they projections are based entirely on radiative factors and assumptions, many of which have been shown to be wrong. Their failures prove that.

It isn’t the fossil-fuel companies that are polluting climate science. Citing documents uncovered by the radical environmental group Greenpeace, a group of media outlets - including the New York Times and the Boston Globe - have attacked global-warming skeptic Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon for allegedly hiding $1.2 million in contributions from “fossil fuel companies.” The articles were the latest in an ongoing campaign by greens and their media allies to discredit opponents of the warming agenda.

But in allying themselves closely with activist groups with which they share ideological goals, reporters have fundamentally misled readers on the facts of global-warming funding. In truth, the overwhelming majority of climate-research funding comes from the federal government and left-wing foundations. And while the energy industry funds both sides of the climate debate, the government/foundation monies go only toward research that advances the warming regulatory agenda. With a clear public-policy outcome in mind, the government/foundation gravy train is a much greater threat to scientific integrity. Officials with the Smithsonian Institution which employs Dr. Soon told the Times it appeared the scientist had violated disclosure standards, and they said they would look into the matter. Soon, a Malaysian immigrant, is a widely respected astrophysicist, and his allies came quickly to his defense. “It is a despicable, reprehensible attack on a man of great personal integrity,” says Myron Ebell, the director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who questioned why media organizations were singling out Soon over research funding.

Indeed, experts in the research community say that it is much more difficult for some of the top climate scientists - Soon, Roger Pielke Jr., the CATO Institute’s Patrick Michaels, MIT’s now-retired Richard Lindzen - to get funding for their work because they do not embrace the global-warming fearmongering favored by the government-funded climate establishment. “Soon’s integrity in the scientific community shines out,” says Ebell. “He has foregone his own career advancement to advance scientific truth. If he had only mouthed establishment platitudes, he could’ve been named to head a big university [research center] like Michael Mann.”

Mann is the controversial director of Pennsylvania State’s Earth System Science Center. He was at the center of the 2009 Climategate scandal, in which e-mails were uncovered from climatologists discussing how to skew scientific evidence and blackball experts who don’t agree with them. Mann is typical of pro-warming scientists who have taken millions from government agencies. The federal government - which will gain unprecedented regulatory power if climate legislation is passed - has funded scientific research to the tune of $32.5 billion since 1989, according the Science and Public Policy Institute. That is an amount that dwarfs research contributions from oil companies and utilities, which have historically funded both sides of the debate. Mann, for example, has received some $6 million, mostly in government grants - according to a study by The American Spectator - including $500,000 in federal stimulus money while he was under investigation for his Climategate e-mails. Despite claims that they are watchdogs of the establishment, media outlets such as the Times have ignored the government’s oversized role in directing research. And they have ignored millions in contributions from left-wing foundations ‘ contributions that, like government grants, seek to tip the scales to one side of the debate.

Last summer, a minority staff report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works gave details on a “Billionaire’s Club” - a shadowy network of charitable foundations that distribute billions to advance climate alarmism. Shadowy nonprofits such as the Energy Foundation and Tides Foundation distributed billions to far-left green groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, which in turn send staff to the EPA who then direct federal grants back to the same green groups. It is incestuous. It is opaque. Major media ignored the report. Media outlets have also discriminated in their reporting on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The Times trumpeted Greenpeace FOIA requests revealing Soon’s benefactors, yet it has ignored the government’s refusal of FOIA filings requesting transparency in pro-warming scientists’ funding. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, has submitted FOIA requests asking for the sources of outside income of NASA scientist James Hansen (a key ally of Al Gore). The government has stonewalled, according to Ebell. Media reporting further misleads readers in suggesting that “fossil fuel” utilities such as the Southern Company (a $409,000 contributor to Soon’s research, according to the Times) seek only to undermine climate science. In truth, energy companies today invest in solar, biomass, and landfill facilities in addition to carbon fuels. Companies such as Duke Energy, Exelon Corporation, NRG Energy, and Shell have even gone so far as to join with green groups in forming the U.S. Climate Action Partnership - an industry/green coalition that wants to “enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”

This alliance worries a scientific community that is hardly unanimous that warming is a threat. Continued funding of contrarians such as Soon and Lindzen is essential to getting the best scientific research at a time when the EPA wants to shut down America’s most affordable power source, coal - at enormous cost to consumers. The lack of warming for over a decade (witness this winter’s dangerous, record-breaking low temperatures) and Climategate are proof that the establishment has oversold a warming crisis. Attempts by the media to shut up their critics ignore the real threat to science.

Henry Payne is auto columnist for the Detroit News, an editorial cartoonist with United Feature Syndicate, and a regular contributor to National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Feb 27, 2015

The Democrat misguided ‘Witch-hunt’ - Funding and Climate Change Research

Marshall Institute

A little over four hundred years after the Salem witch trials, witch-hunts are still used as a tactic of social persecution and a vehicle to censure those who do not conform to a special interest agenda. From Salem to McCarthy to today’s attacks on so called “climate skeptics,” witch-hunts tear the fabric of a free society.

“It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.” Voltaire

In the past week, Greenpeace initiated an attack on Dr. Willie Soon, a scientist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, because of his research on climate change and now several members of Congress have sent letters to 100 organizations that either raise questions and doubts that human activities using fossil energy are causing catastrophic climate change and/or might have provided funds to scientists who are labeled “skeptics.” Letters also have been sent to at least seven universities where some “skeptic” scientists are affiliated. These letters request a lot of funding information.

The misguided assumption, behind what appears to be a politically orchestrated attack on the credibility of those who question the climate orthodoxy, is that their findings and science-based beliefs are insincere and for sale to the highest bidder. The problem with this assumption is that it implies that scientists and researchers who rely primarily on public funding for their climate work are not motivated to tailor their research to the beliefs and policy views of their funding sources.

In 1994, Nightline anchor, Ted Koppel ended a program dealing with climate skepticism this way,

“...issues have to be debated and settled on scientific grounds, not politics. There is nothing new about major institutions seeking to influence science to their own ends. The church did it, ruling families have done it, the communists did it, and so have others, in the name of anti communism. But it has always been a corrupting influence, and it always will be.

The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That’s the hard way to do it, but it’s the only way that works.”

In 2005, then President of the George C. Marshall Institute Jeff Kueter wrote a Policy Outlook on the issue of climate funding. Ten years later Jeff’s analysis and conclusions are every bit as relevant as they were then.

Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,”

--------------

In a letter to Grijalva released this afternoon, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) - a scientific and professional society representing atmospheric and oceanic scientists - expressed strong opposition to the inquiry.

“Publicly singling out specific researchers based on perspectives they have expressed and implying a failure to appropriately disclose funding sources - and thereby questioning their scientific integrity - sends a chilling message to all academic researchers,” the AMS wrote.

See also what Judith Curry says about the issue - she and her university are one of the 7 targets. Roger Pielke Jr., a luke warmer who has researched extreme weather and its impact and has testified with inconvenient facts to congress was another target and he reponded:

“I am Under ‘Investigation’ - Accuses Dems of ‘a politically-motivated ‘witch hunt’ designed to intimidate me (and others) and to smear my name. Congressman Grijalva doesn’t have any evidence of any wrongdoing on my part, either ethical or legal, because there is none. He simply disagrees with the substance of my testimony which is based on peer-reviewed research funded by the US taxpayer, and which also happens to be the consensus of the IPCC (despite Holdren’s incorrect views)’.

‘The incessant attacks and smears are effective, no doubt, I have already shifted all of my academic work away from climate issues. I am simply not initiating any new research or papers on the topic and I have ring-fenced my slowly diminishing blogging on the subject.

Feb 22, 2015

The climate con goes on

Paul Driessen

What’s happening along the climate front never ceases to amaze. We’re being told 2014 and this frigid winter are actually the warmest on record, and all this cold, snow and other “extreme weather” is due to carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. But then the Climate Chaos, Inc. community lets the real cat out of the bag. One top UN official has said their real “climate” mission is to “intentionally transform the [global] economic development model,” while another declares that it is to negotiate “the distribution of the world’s resources.” Meanwhile, a new study reveals that “mainstream” journalists have decided climate change “is real, and we’re responsible.” Therefore, skeptics “are no longer being interviewed,” and at least one news organization now has an explicit editorial policy “discouraging reporters from quoting climate change deniers.” The impacts of their anti-fossil fuel policies on our lives, livelihoods and living standards are deliberately ignored by the media, climate alarmists and too many politicians who supposedly represent us.

My commentary this week delves into all these issues, and more.

Thank you for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.

Some 200 nations may sign a “modest” Kyoto II climate treaty, say December 2014 media reports from Lima, Peru. But will developing nations agree to stop using coal to generate electricity? No. Curtail economic growth? No. Cease emitting carbon dioxide? Maybe, but only a little, sometime in the future, when it is more convenient to do so, without binding commitments. Then why would they sign a treaty?

Primarily because they expect to get free energy technology transfers, and billions of dollars a year in climate “mitigation, adaptation and reparation” money from Western nations that they blame (and which blame themselves) for the “dangerous climate change”, “rising seas” and “extreme weather” that they claim are “unprecedented” and due to carbon dioxide emissions during the 150 years since the Industrial Revolution began. These FRCs (Formerly Rich Countries) have implemented low-carbon energy policies and penalties that have strangled their economies, dramatically increased energy prices and killed millions of jobs. But now poor developing countries demand that they also transfer $100 billion per year, for decades (with most of that probably going to their governing elites’ Swiss banks accounts).

Where is this likely taking us? President Obama has long promised to “fundamentally transform” the U.S. economy and ensure that electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.” His edicts are doing precisely that. And now Christiana Figueres, the UN’s chief climate change official, has declared that her unelected bureaucrats are undertaking ‘probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the [global] economic development model.’ [emphasis added] Her incredible admission underscores what another high-ranking IPCC official said several years ago: “Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection. The next world climate summit is actually an economy summit, during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.’

Why would any sane families or nations consign their fates to such insane, perverse arrangements? The arrangements are being imposed on them, through force, fabrication and fraud.

Poor, middle and working class families will get little but more layoffs, further reductions in living standards and longer postponement of dreams. But meanwhile Climate Chaos, Inc. (Big Green, Big Government, alarmist scientists, crony corporatist “green” energy companies, and allied universities and scientific groups) will become richer, gain more control over our lives and livelihoods, and rarely be held accountable for the damage they cause. Retracting their “dangerous manmade climate change” tautologies would endanger their money, power and reputations.

That’s why their hypotheses, assertions, intentions and computer models always trump reality. It’s why they are increasingly vicious and relentless in vilifying realist scientists like Willie Soon who challenge their “97% consensus” and “manmade climate catastrophe” mantras - and in demanding that the news media ignore experts and analyses that do not toe the Climate Chaos line. They denigrate realists as “climate deniers” (deliberately suggesting Holocaust denial) and “oil industry shills” (while hiding their own suspect ethics, data “adjustments,” and Big Green billion-dollar Russian and other funding sources).

Realists get precious little (or no) oil money and constantly underscore the role of climate change throughout Earth and human history. What we contest is the notion that climate and weather fluctuations today are manmade, unprecedented and dangerous. Alarmists deny that Earth’s climate is often in flux, solar and other natural forces drive weather and climate, and atmospheric carbon dioxide plays only a minimal role. Real-world evidence demolishes virtually every alarmist claim.

The climate reality record is presented in a readable, thought-provoking new book, About Face: Why the world needs more CO2; The failed science of global warming, by late U.S. economist Arthur Hughes, Australian geologist Cliff Ollier and Canadian meteorologist Madhav Khandekar. Sea level is rising at only 1.5 mm per year now (six inches per century), they note, and there is zero evidence that the rate is escalating or that coastal communities are at risk. Nor is ?ocean acidification” a legitimate problem.

Alarmists use it to replace other disproven scares with a new panic. Earth’s oceans have never been acidic. They are mildly alkaline. Their enormous volumes of water cannot become acidic - that is, plummet from an 8.2 pH level 150 years ago and their current 8.1 pH into the acidic realm of 7.0 or lower, due to the tiny amount of atmospheric CO2 attributable to fossil fuel use, in less than five centuries, experts explain.

The tiny effect of rising CO2 levels on climate contrasts sharply with their enormous benefits to plant growth and agriculture. Not only is more CO2 “greening” deserts, forests and grasslands; it is increasing grain and food yields worldwide, and helping people in developing nations live longer, healthier lives.

Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are not in danger of collapsing, the About Face authors demonstrate; in fact, they are growing. Similarly, contrary to another scare, extreme weather events are not increasing.

No Category 3-5 hurricane has struck the United States for a record nine years, and Earth’s temperature has not budged for 18 years. Claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record” are based on airport and urban measurements that are higher than rural locations and are always “adjusted” upward, with year-to-year differences expressed in hundredths of a degree. Outside those areas, for most of the world - the 70% of Earth’s surface that is oceans and 85% of land area that is mountains, deserts, grasslands, tundra, and boreal or tropical rain forests - practically no data exist. So NASA and other alarmists falsely extrapolate from their manipulated urban data to fill in massive gaps for the other 95% of the Earth.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Northeast is suffering through record snows and its lowest winter temperatures in decades, and America’s East Coast air has been 25-30 degrees F below normal. England’s winter death rate is almost one-third higher than normal: nearly 29,000 deaths in a two-week period in January 2015, largely because people can no longer afford to heat their homes properly, due to UK climate policies.

What’s really going on? Our sun “has gone quiet again, during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century,” dating back to 1906, says Vencore weather analyst Paul Dorian.

Alarmists don’t want to talk about that - or about what is happening in Asia. BP’s Energy Outlook 2035 report forecasts that China’s oil, natural gas and coal use will increase by some 50% and its carbon dioxide emissions by 37% over the next 20 years. India’s energy production will soar 117% ‘ with fossil fuels accounting for 87% of all demand in 2035. Its CO2 emissions will also skyrocket. So even if the USA and EU eliminated fossil fuels, atmospheric carbon dioxide would continue to climb.

Climate alarmists want the newspaper and television media to ignore this information and the “skeptics” who might present it. Bill Nye “the science guy” recently asked MSNBC to link all weather events to climate change. “Just say the words climate change” when you talk about this winter’s cold and snow,” he begged. A new study shows how widespread these repulsive practices have become.

Quoting one journalist, a George Mason University analysis found that U.S. media outlets “pretty much” agree that climate change “is real, it’s happening, and we’re responsible. That debate is over.” As a result, “critics are no longer being interviewed,” the study said. In the view of “mainstream” media outlets, seeking or presenting both sides on the climate issue is a “false balance.” At least one news organization now has an explicit editorial policy “discouraging reporters from quoting climate change deniers in environment or science coverage,” the Washington Examiner noted.

Media reputations are at stake. They’ve been in bed so long with the Climate Chaos complex that acknowledging the critical role of natural forces, the expertise of climate realists, the debate that still rages, or the Grand Canyon between climate crisis claims and real-world evidence would destroy what little credibility the media still has. It would also start the collapse of the Climate Chaos house of cards.

But the real stakes are much higher. They are the businesses, jobs, families, living standards and liberties that will be increasingly threatened if President Obama, EPA, Big Green and the United Nations remain free to impose their climate and energy agenda. Responsible governors, state legislators and members of Congress must get involved, block these actions, and roll back the destructive policies.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.

Alex Epstein’s long-anticipated book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, published by Penguin, comes out today! I reviewed it as, “simply the best popular-market book about climate, environmental policy, and energy that I have read. Laymen and experts alike will be boggled by Epstein’s clarity.”

Alex recently sent us a brief essay based upon material in the book. Alex Epstein is President and Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress - an organization sowing the seeds of energy enthusiasm to counter the tide of climate alarmism. We asked Alex to share a few thoughts with our readers here at Cato; find them below.

If you are in Washington, you might want to meet Alex. He will be giving a Hill Briefing in B-369 Rayburn at 9am on Friday, November 21.

If you ever get asked the vague but morally-charged question “Do you believe in climate change?” someone is trying to put something over on you.

Climate change is a constant of nature and everyone agrees that fossil fuels have some impact on our naturally variable, volatile, and often vicious climate.

The question is whether it will have a catastrophic impact - one so bad it justifies restricting the only practical way to get energy in the foreseeable future to the 3 billion people who have next to none of it: fossil fuels. (No country relies on the sun and wind for energy, but rich countries can afford to pay tens or hundreds of billions to install and accommodate allegedly virtuous wind turbines and solar panels on their grids.)

The real issue is climate catastrophe. I’m not a climate-change skeptic. I’m a climate catastrophe skeptic-and here’s one graph that shows why you should be, too.

No, it’s not showing temperatures have gone up half a degree in the 80 years we’ve used a lot of fossil fuels, which is barely more than they went up the prior 80 years. Nor does it show temperatures have flattened in the past eighteen years while the world’s leading climate catastrophists predicted dramatic, accelerating, runaway warming. Dr. James Hansen predicted that temperatures would increase between two-and-a-half and five degrees in 20 years!

But that’s not the graph that really matters. There is no intrinsically perfect global temperature and, if there was, we would expect it to be warmer. Until it became politically correct for temperature trends to warm, people around the world prayed for far more warming than we’ve experienced. There is no time in human history when it has been considered “too warm” for human beings.

What matters is: is the climate becoming more or less livable? The key statistic here, one that is unfortunately almost never mentioned, is “climate-related deaths.”

The best source I have found for this data is the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters International Disaster Database (OFDA/CRED EM-DAT), based in Brussels.1 It gathers data about disasters since 1900.

Here is a graph comparing CO2 emissions, the alleged climate danger, to the number of climate-related deaths, which reflects actual climate danger to humans. It’s striking as CO2 emissions rise, climate-related deaths plunge.

To make matters better, in reality the trend is even more dramatically downward, as before the 1970s many disasters went unreported. One big reason for this was lack of satellite data - we can now see the whole world, enabling us to track icecaps and disaster areas with relative ease. In 1950, if there was a disaster in the middle of what is now Bangladesh, would information have been accurately collected? In general, we can expect in more recent years, more deaths were recorded and in earlier years, fewer deaths were recorded. For some countries there is simply no good data, because in underdeveloped places like Haiti or Ethiopia we do not even know exactly how many people lived in a particular place before a disaster struck. Today we have much better information - and because disaster statistics are tied to aid, there is incentive to overreport.

And the more we dig into the data, the stronger the correlations get.

Here are a couple of striking numbers from the data: in the decade from 2004 to 2013, worldwide climate-related deaths (including droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and storms) plummeted to a level 88.6 percent below that of the peak decade, 1930 to 1939.2 The year 2013, with 29,404 reported deaths, had 99.4 percent fewer climate-related deaths than the historic record year of 1932, which had 5,073,283 reported deaths for the same category.3

That reduction occurred despite more complete reporting, an incentive to declare greater damage to gain more aid, and a massively growing population, particularly in vulnerable places like coastal areas, in recent times.

The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous - we make it livable through development and technology - development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate livable for 7 billion people.

As the climate-related death data show, there are some major benefits - namely, the power of fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on. Why weren’t those mentioned in the discussion when we talked about storms like Sandy and Irene, even though anyone going through those storms was far more protected from them than he or she would have been a century ago?

I have debated representatives of the three leading environmental organizations in the world - Greenpeace, Sierra Club and 350.org - including 350.org’s Bill McKibben, the leading environmentalist in the world today - and every time, I have repeatedly mentioned the climate livability statistics. I raised it to Bill McKibben before I debated him and half a dozen times during my debate with him - he didn’t acknowledge it. He just called it “one number.” Yeah, one number, based on billions of empirical observations, that destroys billions of dollars worth of speculation.

Why? Because the dogma that man is ruining the planet rather than improving it is a religion, a source of prestige, and a career for too many people. But for the rest of us, the statistic climate catastrophists don’t want us to know is very, very good news.

THE debate about climate change is finished because it has been categorically proved NOT to exist, one of the world’s leading meteorologists has claimed.

John Coleman, who co-founded the Weather Channel, shocked academics by insisting the theory of man-made climate change was no longer scientifically credible.

Instead, what ‘little evidence’ there is for rising global temperatures points to a ‘natural phenomenon’ within a developing eco-system.

In an open letter attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he wrote: “The ocean is not rising significantly.The polar ice is increasing, not melting away. Polar Bears are increasing in number.”

“Heat waves have actually diminished, not increased. There is not an uptick in the number or strength of storms (in fact storms are diminishing).”

“I have studied this topic seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.”

I have studied climate change seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.

John Coleman, co-founder of the Weather Channel

Mr Coleman said he based many of his views on the findings of the NIPCC, a non-governmental international body of scientists aimed at offering an ‘independent second opinion of the evidence reviewed by the IPCC.’

He added: “There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future.

“Efforts to prove the theory that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas and pollutant causing significant warming or weather effects have failed.

“There has been no warming over 18 years.”

The IPCC argue their research shows that man-made global warming will lead to extreme weather events becoming more frequent and unpredictable.

US News and World Report noted that many of the world’s largest businesses, including Coke, Pepsi, Walmart, Nestle, Mars, Monsanto, Kellogg, General Mills, Microsoft, and IBM, “are now engaged and actively responding to climate science and data.”

Mr Coleman’s comments come as President Barack Obama came under fire from climatologists as federal data revealed The United State’s energy-related carbon pollution rose 2.5 per cent despite the President’s pledges to decrease it.

President Obama told 120 world leaders at the United Nations climate summit last month that America had done more under his watch in cutting greenhouse gases than any other country.

Despite this, the Energy Information Administration’s Monthly Energy Review showed an increase in the use of energy from coal.

World leaders have pledged to keep the global average temperature from rising two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to prevent the worst consequences of climate change.

The US, along with the UK and other developed countries, is expected to pledge further actions on climate change early next year.

Global warming climate change lieThere has been no recorded global warming for 18 years [GETTY]

He added: “No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the single-minded demonisation of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production.”

“The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.”

In 2010 a high-level inquiry by the InterAcademy Council found there was “little evidence” to support the IPCC’s claims about global warming.

It also said the panel had purposely emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.

On October 15, 2014 Dr. William Happer, Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, discussed “The Myth of Carbon Pollution.”

“Carbon pollution” is a propaganda slogan for the campaign against carbon dioxide (CO2). It is not science. Atmospheric CO2 is not a pollutant but is essential for plant growth. Current CO2 levels are far below optimum for most plants, and far below norms of geological history, when CO2 concentrations averaged several times higher than present values. A substantial fraction, about 15%, of current world food production is due to the higher levels of CO2 compared to preindustrial values. Contrary to unambiguous computer predictions, there has been no statistically significant surface warming in at least 15 years. It is now clear that the warming potential of CO2 has been exaggerated by a large amount, and it is unlikely to be much more than 1oC for doubling of CO2. There is not the slightest evidence that more CO2 has caused more extreme weather or accelerated sea level rise. Nor is there the slightest support for the notion that government control of CO2 will “stop climate change.” Many real environmental issues need attention, smog, waste disposal, short-sighted suburban development, adequate clean water, public health, etc. These are being overshadowed by the phony issue of “carbon pollution.”

Dr. William Happer is Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics (emeritus) at Princeton University, a long-term member of the JASON advisory group, and former director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. In addition to being a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt award, the Herbert P. Broida Prize and the Thomas Alva Edison patent award.

Rohrabacher serves as the vice chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which has jurisdiction over NASA and other agencies that monitor the Earth’s climate.

Rohrabacher has long been critical of the theory of man-made global warming. Lately, the California Republican has criticizing NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for allegedly tampering with temperature data to create an artificial warming trend. Such data is then used to justify regulations aimed at curbing fossil fuel use and other industrial activities.

@grngamine journalist investigation shows records of various weather stations altered by AGW advocates to make it appear to be warming. -Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 19, 2015

Rohrabacher isn’t the only one to call for hearings on the science behind global warming. Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe has also promised to hold hearings on global warming data.

“We’re going to have a committee hearing on the science,” said Inhofe, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “People are going to hear the other side of the story.”

For years, those skeptical of man-made global warming have argued that government agencies are altering raw temperature data to create a warming trend. Allegations of tampering have increased as satellite temperature readings show much less warming than land and ocean-based weather stations show.

Science blogger Steven Goddard (a pseudonym) has been a major critic of NASA’s and NOAA’s temperature measurements. Goddard points out that NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center makes the present look warmer by artificially cooling past temperatures to show a warming trend.

“NCDC pulls every trick in the book to turn the US cooling trend into warming. The raw data shows cooling since the 1920s,” Goddard told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview last month.

“NCDC does a hockey stick of adjustments to reverse the trend,” Goddard said. “This includes cooling the past for ‘time of observation bias’ infilling missing rural data with urban temperatures, and doing almost nothing to compensate for urban heat island effects.”

NOAA does make temperature adjustments, but it argues such adjustments are necessary to remove “artificial biases” in surface temperature data. The biggest adjustment made by NCDC scientists is cooling past data to take into account the fact that there was a big shift from taking temperature readings in the afternoon to the morning.

“We get a lot of people questioning our data adjustments,” Thomas Peterson, NCDC’s principal scientist, told TheDCNF. There was an “artificial cool bias in the data,” Peterson said.

Switching the time of the day temperatures were taken from the afternoon, when temperatures are warmer, to the morning, when temperatures are cooler, caused a cooling bias in the data. Temperature data from nearby weather stations was used to help create a baseline temperature for different regions.

But there are some drawbacks in surface temperature readings from a few thousand weather stations, boats and buoys spread out across the world. Peterson said the weather station system is “only really good for the U.S.”

“The main problem is where there are a few stations in the middle of nowhere.” Peterson said, specifically referring to weather station data problems on St. Helena Island.

UK Telegraph writer Christopher Booker joined the fray recently, using work by Goddard and other bloggers to criticize climate agencies for data tampering.

“Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record...has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known,” Booker wrote. “This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.”

“Social responsibility” activists want universities and pension funds to eliminate fossil fuel companies from their investment portfolios. They plan to spotlight their demands on “Global Divestment Day,” February 13-14. Their agenda is misguided, immoral, lethal...even racist.

A mere 200 years ago, the vast majority of humans were poor, sick and malnourished. Life expectancy in 1810 was less than 40 years, and even royal families lived under sanitation, disease and housing standards inferior to what poor American families enjoy today. Then a veritable revolution occurred.

The world began to enjoy a bonanza in wealth, technology, living standards and life spans. In just two centuries, average world incomes rose eleven-fold, disease rates plummeted, and life expectancy more than doubled. Unfortunately, not everyone benefitted equally, and even today billions of people still live under conditions little better than what prevailed in 1810. Bringing them from squalor, disease and early death to modernity may be our most important economic, technological and moral challenge.

Many factors played vital roles in this phenomenal advancement. However, as Julian Simon, Indur Goklany, Alex Epstein and the authors of this article have documented, driving all this progress were fossil fuels that provided the energy for improvements in industry, transportation, housing, healthcare and environmental quality, and for huge declines in climate-related deaths due to storms, droughts, heat and cold. Modern civilization is undeniably high energy - and 85% of the world’s energy today is still coal, oil and natural gas. These fuels support $70 trillion per year in global gross domestic product, to power virtually everything we make, grow, ship, drive, eat and do. The rest of the world deserves nothing less.

Demands that institutions eliminate hydrocarbon stocks, and society stop using fossil fuels, would reverse this progress, jeopardize people’s health and living standards, and prevent billions of still impoverished people worldwide from enjoying the living standards that many of us take for granted.

Trains and automobiles would not run. Planes would not fly. Refrigeration, indoor plumbing, safe food and water, central heating and air conditioning, plastics and pharmaceuticals would disappear or become luxuries for wealthy elites. We would swelter in summer and freeze in winter. We’d have electricity only when it’s available, not when we need it - to operate assembly lines, conduct classes and research, perform life-saving surgeries, and use computers, smart phones and social media.

Divesting fossil fuels portfolios is also financially imprudent. Fossil-fuel stocks are among the best for solid, risk-adjusted returns. One analysis found that a 2.1% share in fossil fuel companies by colleges and universities generated 5.7% of all endowment gains in 2010 to 2011, to fund scholarship, building and other programs. Teacher, police and other public pension funds have experienced similar results.

That may be why such institutions often divest slowly, if at all, over 5-10 years, to maximize their profits. One is reminded of St. Augustine of Hippo’s prayer: “Please let me be chaste and celibate - but not yet.” The “ethical” institutions selling fossil fuel stocks also need to find buyers who are willing to stand up to divestment pressure group insults and harassment. They also need to deal with hard realities.

No “scalable” alternative fuels currently exist to replace fossil fuels. To avoid the economic, social, environmental and human health catastrophes that would follow the elimination of hydrocarbons, we would need affordable, reliable options on a large enough scale to replace the fuels we rely on today. The divestment movement ignores the enormity of current and future global energy needs (met and unmet), and the fact that existing “renewable” technologies cannot possibly meet those requirements.

Fossil fuels produce far more energy per acre than biofuels, notes analyst Howard Hayden. Using biomass - instead of coal or natural gas - to generate electricity for one U.S. city of 700,000 people would require cutting down trees across an area the size of Rhode Island every year. Making corn-based ethanol to replace the gasoline in U.S. vehicles would require planting every single acre of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, North and South Dakota and Wisconsin in corn for fuel. Wind and solar currently provide just 3% of global energy consumption, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports; by 2040, as the world’s population continues to grow, hydroelectric, wind, solar, biomass and geothermal energy combined will still represent only 15% of the total, the EIA predicts.

Not using fossil fuels is tantamount to not using energy. It is economic suicide and eco-manslaughter.

Over the past three decades, fossil fuels enabled 1.3 billion people to escape debilitating energy poverty - over 830 million thanks to coal alone - and China connected 99% of its population to the grid and increased its steel production eight times over, again mostly with coal. However, 1.3 billion people are still desperate for electricity and modern living standards. In India alone, over 300 million people (the population of the entire United States) remain deprived of electricity.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, some 615 million (100 million more than in the USA, Canada and Mexico combined) still lack this life-saving technology, and 730 million (the population of Europe) still cook and heat with wood, charcoal and animal dung. Millions die every year from lung and intestinal diseases, due to breathing smoke from open fires and not having the safe food and water that electricity brings.

Ending this lethal energy deprivation will require abundant, reliable, affordable energy on unprecedented scales, and more than 80% of it will have to come from fossil fuels. Coal now provides 40% of the world’s electricity, and much more than that in some countries. That is unlikely to change anytime soon.

We cannot even build wind and solar facilities without coal and petroleum: to mine, smelt, manufacture and transport materials for turbines, panels and transmission lines - and to build and operate backup power units that also require vast amounts of land, cement, steel, copper, rare earth metals and other materials.

Coal-fired power plants in China, India and other developing countries do emit large quantities of sulfates, nitrous oxides, mercury and soot that can cause respiratory problems and death. However, modern pollution control systems could - and eventually will - eliminate most of that.

Divestment activists try to counter these facts by claiming that climate science is settled and the world faces a manmade global warming cataclysm. On that basis they demand that colleges and universities forego any debate and rush to judgment on hydrocarbon divestment. However, as we have pointed out here and elsewhere, the alleged “97% consensus” is a fiction, no manmade climate crisis is looming, and there is abundant evidence of massive “pHraud” in all too much climate chaos “research.”

We therefore ask: What right do divestment activists and climate change alarmists have to deny Earth’s most destitute people access to electricity and motor fuels, jobs and better lives? To tell people what level of economic development, health and living standards they will be “permitted” to enjoy? To subject people to policies that “safeguard” families from hypothetical, exaggerated, manufactured and illusory climate change risks 50 to 100 years from now - by imposing energy, economic and healthcare deprivation that will perpetuate disease and could kill them tomorrow?

That is not ethical. It is intolerant and totalitarian. It is arrogant, immoral, lethal and racist.

To these activists, we say: “You first. Divest yourselves first. Get fossil fuels out of your lives. All of them. Go live in Sub-Saharan Africa just like the natives for a few months, drinking their parasite-infested water, breathing their polluted air, enduring their disease-ridden flies and mosquitoes - without benefit of modern drugs or malaria preventatives...and walking 20 miles to a clinic when you collapse with fever.

To colleges, universities and pension funds, we suggest this: Ensure open, robust debate on all these issues, before you vote on divestment. Allow no noisy disruption, walk-outs or false claims of consensus. Compel divestment advocates to defend their positions, factually and respectfully. Protect the rights and aspirations of people everywhere to reliable, affordable electricity, better living standards and improved health. And instead of “Global Divestment Day,” host and honor “Hydrocarbon Appreciation Day.”

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death. Dr. Roger Bezdek is an internationally recognized energy analyst and president of Management Information Services, Inc., in Washington, DC (www.MISI-net.com).

An Environmental Protection Agency memo sent to top officials implored the agency to build up support for its agenda by tying its regulatory agenda to the “personal worries” of Americans.

“Polar ice caps and the polar bears have become the climate change ‘mascots,’ if you will, and personify the challenges we have in making this issue real for many Americans,” reads a memo sent around to top agency officials in March 2009, just months after President Barack Obama took office.

“Most Americans will never see a polar ice cap, nor will most have the chance to see a polar bear in its natural habitat,” the memo reads. “Therefore, it is easy to detach from the seriousness of this issue. Unfortunately, climate change in the abstract is an increasingly - and consistently - unpersuasive argument to make.”

“However, if we shift from making this about the polar caps and about our neighbor with respiratory illness we can potentially bring this issue home to many Americans,” the memo adds. “There will be many opportunities to discuss climate-related efforts this year. As we do so, we must allow the human health argument to take center stage.”

The EPA memo even says to use people’s children as a way to build up support for their efforts to fight global warming and ramp up clean air and water regulations.

“This justifies our work at the most base level. By revitalizing our own Children’s Health Office, leading the global charge on this issue, and highlighting the children’s health dimension to all of our major initiatives, we will also make this issue real for many Americans who otherwise would oppose many of our regulatory actions,” the memo reads.

The EPA memos were obtained by Chris Horner, attorney and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, through a Freedom of Information Act request. Horner found the memo in a trove of emails to former EPA chief Lisa Jackson’s secret email account, which used the alias “Richard Windsor.”

“What this memo shows is the recognition that EPA needed to move its global warming campaign away from the failed global model of discredited Big Green pressure groups and their icons,” Horner told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“In it, we see the birth of the breathtakingly disingenuous ;shift from making this about the polar caps [to] about our neighbor with respiratory illness,’” Horner said. It also shows the conviction that if they yell ‘clean air’ and ‘children’ enough, they, the media and the green groups will get their way.”

The memo was circulated as federal lawmakers were debating cap-and-trade legislation during Obama’s first term in office. A cap-and-trade bill passed out of the House in June 2009, but was eventually defeated in the Senate after opponents successfully tied the effort to a de facto energy tax.

Since this defeat, however, the Obama administration has been keen on focusing on the public health benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Near the end of 2009, the EPA found that greenhouse gases posed a threat to public health because they cause global warming. But greenhouse gases don’t directly impact public health, so the EPA relied on other ways to connect the dots.

When the EPA released the first-ever regulations on greenhouse gas tailpipe emissions in 2012, the agency touted the rule’s public health benefits, resulting from reduced amounts of traditional air pollutants coming from tailpipes.

More recently, the EPA said rules to cut carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants would result in fewer asthma attacks, especially in children. But these alleged public health benefits come from reducing smog and other air pollutants, not carbon dioxide.

“Asthma disproportionately affects African-American kids,” said current EPA chief Gina McCarthy. “In just the first year these standards go into effect, we’ll avoid up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks - and those numbers go up from there.”

“These standards are also doing more than to just address public health. By the time these standards are fully in place in 2030, the average household will also save $8 a month on electricity and create thousands of jobs that can’t be shipped overseas,” McCarthy said.

The memo also mentions convincing “unchurched” Americans who belong to other activist groups to support fighting global warming.

“For many, environmental protection is about the caribou, polar bears, and sea otters,” reads the memo. “While our work certainly impacts all of these creatures, it obviously does not reflect our day-to-day work. It is important for us to change this perception, particularly among those who are critically impacted by [environmental justice] issues - but are otherwise ‘unchurched.’ (By unchurched, I mean they are not affiliated with a group or effort that would self-identify as EJ or environmentalist.)”

Read more from Larry Bell here.
He notes: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that these new EPA rules will shut down hundreds of generators, cost the U.S. economy 2.3 million jobs and half a trillion in lost GDP over the next ten years, and add $289 billion in consumer electricity costs to lower household disposable incomes by $586 billion by 2030.

In the “The Great Climate Change Denial Industry,” University of Connecticut geology professor Robert Thorson sought to discredit all dissent about climate change by tying it (falsely in most cases) to funding from the fossil fuel industry - niftily adopting the logical fallacy of ad hominem circumstantial while ignoring the fact that advocates of global warming alarmism get hundreds of times as much funding from governments (with their own biases) and alternative-energy corporations, making them subject to the same critique (still fallacious, but sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander).

After sniping at religion (as if only fundamentalists are “climate skeptics"), bemoaning the decline in public fears of global warming but lacking the curiosity to ask whether there might be good reasons, and repeating the myth that polar bears are endangered, Thorson progressed to errors of fact and, well, more fallacious reasoning.

One: It’s real. Yes, as throughout earth’s history. But Thorson equivocates (fallacy). What he means by “climate change” is historically unprecedented and dangerous global warming driven primarily by human emission of carbon dioxide. Substitute that and “It’s real” becomes highly debatable and is highly debated, even among climate scientists,

like former NASA and now Columbia University astrophysicist James Hansen, who affirms it,

like professor and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry, who went from affirming it to strongly questioning it after interacting with climate scientists who reject it,

like University of Alabama climatologists John Christy and Roy Spencer, who manage NASA’s satellite remote sensing program and together won NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites.

The Medieval Warm Period was warmer than now, and at least two periods since 1850 but before CO2 rose enough to contribute significantly had as rapid and as long upward trends in global average temperature as the warming trend from about 1977 to 2000 that some attribute to higher CO2. So “modern warming” is not unprecedented.

The 97% “consensus” study, Cook et al. (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook’s study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it,

“The ‘97% consensus’ article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it.”

Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)

Only 65 Scientists of 12,000 Make up Alleged 97% on Climate Change and Global Warming Consensus According to Breakdown of Cook et al study, say Friends of Science

In response to multiple inquiries from media and global warming advocates, Friends of Science issue this release to expose the statistical manipulation evident from the break down of the Cook et al paper. Friends of Science decry the linking of this flawed study with alleged danger from man-made carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) as there has been no global warming in 16 years despite a rise in CO2 levels; Friends of Science say the sun and oceanic oscillations are the main drivers of climate change, not CO2.

The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook’s (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% “consensus” study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook’s study is an embarrassment to science.

In a paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, Esper et al. (2014) write that tree-ring chronologies of maximum latewood density (MXD) “are most suitable to reconstruct annually resolved summer temperature variations of the late Holocene.: And working with what they call “the world’s two longest MXD-based climate reconstructions” - those of Melvin et al. (2013) and Esper et al. (2012) - they combined portions of each to produce a new-and-improved summer temperature history for northern Europe that stretches all the way “from 17 BC to the present.” And what did they thereby learn?

As the international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Sweden and Switzerland describes it, this history depicts “a long-term cooling trend of -0.30C per 1,000 years over the Common Era in northern Europe” (see figure below). Most important of all, however, they note that their temperature reconstruction “has centennial-scale variations superimposed on this trend,” which indicate that “conditions during Medieval and Roman times were probably warmer than in the late 20th century,” when the previously-rising post-Little Ice Age mean global air temperature hit a ceiling of sorts above which it has yet to penetrate.

PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.

SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.

DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.

CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce ‘panic for profit.’

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for “DATA” by “DENIERS.’ Also skilled at affecting an aura of “Smartest Person in the Room” to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.

JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge

--------

Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl’s excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.

NOTE:

See all the talks at the latest ICCC9 Conference in Las Vegas in 2014 here.

Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV. If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.

----------------------

See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.

-----------------------

See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additional scientific youtubes here.

“The above papers support skepticism of “man-made” global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary.”

The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.

The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under “What’s New” or “A Primer on Global Warming.” Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.

---------------

See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.

The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” - Socrates (470--399 BC)